New Paradise Laboratories Explores the Boundary Between Live Theater and Online Life

Before you arrive at the theater, would you be interested in interacting with the characters in the play on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr?

New Paradise Laboratories ("NPL") is a Philadelphia-based theater company where company members develop their (fictional) characters online - interacting with the audience via social media - before and after the in-person experiences unfold in a theater.

According to a March 24th, 2012 Mashable post by Joann Pan, NPL is "pulling theater into the virtual space."

“I feel like it’s like a medium where stories can be told in a whole bunch of ways,” NPL’s artistic director and Obie-winner Whit MacLaughlin told Mashable. “I wanted to find out how you use translate theater into an online space. You have to figure out the narration of social media — how to convey something about a person.”

NPL's recent Extremely Public Displays of Privacy is available online.